Finding Time for the Old Stone Age explores a century of colourful debate over the age of our earliest ancestors. In the mid nineteenth century curious stone implements were found alongside the bones of extinct animals. Humans were evidently more ancient than had been supposed - but just how old were they? There were several clocks for Stone-Age (or Palaeolithic) time, and it would prove difficult to synchronize them. Conflicting timescales were drawn from the fields of geology, palaeontology, anthropology, and archaeology. Anne O'Connor draws on a wealth of lively, personal correspondence to explain the nature of these arguments. The trail leads from Britain to Continental Europe, Africa, and Asia, and extends beyond the world of professors, museum keepers, and officers of the Geological Survey: wine sellers, diamond merchants, papermakers, and clerks also proposed timescales for the Palaeolithic. This book brings their stories to light for the first time - stories that offer an intriguing insight into how knowledge was built up about the ancient British past.

Dorothy Garrod opened many doors; not only was she the first female professor at Cambridge University, but she illuminated - and in some cases initiated - some of prehistoric archaeology's most central issues. The quiet yet self possessed woman was best known as a fieldworker, often venturing into dangerous regions such as Kurdistan. Her first and highly successful excavation revealed fragments of Neanderthal fossils in Gibralter. This volume reviews modern research on this site, as well as exploring other issues which interested the Disney Professor of Archaeology: hominid remains from Mount Carmel; Palaeolithic sites in the Zagros Mountains, Bulgaria and Britain; and the cultural evidence for the beginning of Near Eastern food production, which Garrod called Natufian. Also included are papers concerned with her life, background and published work. The topics' span and continuing relevance are testament to Dorothy Garrod's remarkable character and great achievements.

This volume offers a system for the hierarchical classification of British lithic artefacts from the Late Glacial and Holocene periods, and it is hoped that it may find use as a guide book for, for example, archaeology students, museum staff, non-specialist archaeologists, local archaeology groups and lay enthusiasts.

The British Palaeolithic provides the first academic synthesis of the entire British Palaeolithic, from the earliest occupation (currently understood to be around 980,000 years ago) to the end of the Ice Age. Landscape and ecology form the canvas for an explicitly interpretative approach aimed at understanding the how different hominin societies addressed the issues of life at the edge of the Pleistocene world. Commencing with a consideration of the earliest hominin settlement of Europe, the book goes on to examine the behavioural, cultural and adaptive repertoires of the first human occupants of Britain from an ecological perspective. These themes flow throughout the book as it explores subsequent occupational pulses across more than half a million years of Pleistocene prehistory, which saw Homo heidelbergensis, the Neanderthals and ultimately Homo sapiens walk these shores. The British Palaeolithic fills a major gap in teaching resources as well as in research by providing a current synthesis of the latest research on the period. This book represents the culmination of 40 years combined research in this area by two well known experts in the field, and is an important new text for students of British archaeology as well as for students and researchers of the continental Palaeolithic period.